FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- A 16-year-old from Fort Lauderdale who traveled to Iraq on his own without telling his parents was put on a flight home Friday, the U.S. Embassy said, while warning Americans of the dangers of undertaking similar journeys.

Farris Hassan had been under the care of the U.S. Embassy after being on his own in Baghdad, Iraq, for several days.

"He's a boy with a lot of conviction and very high self-esteem and confidence," his mother, Shatha Atiya, said Friday after learning he was on his way home.

The U.S. Embassy had no immediate information about Hassan's flight.

Consul General Richard B. Hermann said Hassan left Baghdad safely.

"This young American is now on his way back home to his family in the United States," Hermann said.

Hassan, a junior honors student at Pine Crest School, a prep academy of about 700 students in Fort Lauderdale, recently studied immersion journalism -- one who lives the life of his subject in order to better understand it.

The teenager, whose parents were born in Iraq but have lived in the United States for about 35 years, said he wanted to travel to Baghdad to better understand how Iraqis live.

Skipping a week of school, he left the country Dec. 11 with a $900 plane ticket he purchased with his own savings, telling only two high school friends of his plans. His travels took him to Kuwait and Lebanon before he arrived in Iraq Christmas Day.

He left without telling his family and sent an e-mail after his departure, his mother said.

"I was being crazy," she said. "It's many sleepless nights, just being terrified and extremely worried about him."

The teen traveled to Kuwait, where a taxi dropped him in the desert at the Iraq border, but he could not cross there because of tightened security ahead of the Iraqi parliamentary elections Dec. 15. He went to Beirut, Lebanon, to stay with family friends, and flew from there to Baghdad.

After his second night in Baghdad, he contacted The Associated Press and said he had come to do research and humanitarian work. The AP called the U.S. Embassy, which sent U.S. soldiers to pick him up.

State Department officials then notified his parents.

Hassan spent his Christmas interviewing soldiers and drinking tea with Kuwaitis.

Atiya Hassan said she has a 60-year-old brother in Iraq, but that she had refused to give Farris his phone number when he recently pestered her for it. She said she offered to take her son to Iraq later, when tensions eased.

"I thought that would be sufficient for him, but he took it upon himself to do this adventure," she said. "He has a lot of confidence, but I never thought he would be able to pull this together."

Hassan does not speak Arabic and has no experience in war zones, but he wanted to find out what life was like there.

Atiya said her son is studious, works on the school newspaper and is on the debate team. He is a member of a Republican club at school who spends his time reading, his mother said.

When school officials learned of Hassan's trip, they threatened to expel him, but his parents persuaded officials to allow him to remain, Atiya Hassan said. It was not immediately clear why the school wanted to expel him.

Julie Schiedegger, who teaches English at Pine Crest, said Friday that she learned Hassan was headed to Iraq about two weeks ago when she overheard some students talking about it.

Hassan is the youngest of four children. The others are enrolled at universities.

Aside from the research Hassan wanted to accomplish, he also wrote in an essay that he wanted to volunteer in Iraq.

He said he wrote half the essay while in the United States, half in Kuwait, and e-mailed it to his teachers Dec. 15 while in the Kuwait City airport.

"There is a struggle in Iraq between good and evil, between those striving for freedom and liberty and those striving for death and destruction," he wrote.

Hassan said he understood how dangerous his trip was. He said that his plans on his return to Florida were to "kiss the ground and hug everyone."